The problem with social media, as thousands of users have experienced, is it only becomes valuable when you have a people in your networks that reply to you.
It’s easy enough to get some family members and high school chums to reply occasionally, but for the fascinating professional feedback we all crave, you have to network with people you know and share commonalities with. If you “follow” a bunch of people who don’t know you, they won’t reply to your posts because… they don’t know you. Social media is all about the relationships. People rarely decided to “like” or “retweet” based on the content of the post alone. They balance that with their knowledge of the poster.
So if you want social media to have a positive effect for you in more than just a casual way, you have two options:
A) Get all your coworkers and colleagues to use the same networks that you do, proficiently.
or
B) Work laboriously to become part of certain networks by posting to their blogs, commenting on posts, and generally showing yourself as a person worthy of their CPU cycles.
April 10th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Social Media is only useful if you have Friends http://ff.im/-22nIx
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
April 10th, 2009 at 10:09 am
But social media can help you make friends!
April 12th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
It can indeed although for me my relationships with colleagues I work with are much stronger that those with people whom I’ve only met online. Seems its a bit of a chicken/egg situation.
April 13th, 2009 at 11:17 am
For the most part an individual person is only interesting to their friends, or family. At least with friends, this means that background or interests are similar. I think the hope for the Internet (you can tell how long I’ve been around for using that work and not web or web 2.0) is that it can connect people together who have similar interests. The main problem I find with that thesis, is that for most of us (aside from work) our primary interests are not related to creating content. So you land up with the distribution of lots of people watching a very few people! If only we could come up with the social media equivalent of a sitting in a bar with a couple of pints and some mates!
September 7th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
But social media can help you make friends!
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